by Tara Conklin
And Noni? On the day of Jonah’s college graduation, she will fly from New York to Seattle, and in those hours over the vast sweep of the United States something goes wrong. Something fails inside her brain, one blood vessel, a nerve, a synapse that does not connect to its partner. Renee meets her at the gate but senses immediately that Noni is not well. “I’m perfectly fine,” Noni says, and waves Renee away, but later in the hotel she’ll lie on the bed and pull the covers over her body and she’ll talk to Renee, a sometimes nonsensical monologue about her childhood, about the first boy she kissed, the teacher who told her she was too smart for secretarial school, the doctor who felt her breasts with her mother in the room, the summer day she first met our father, and other days, other events we’d never known or thought to ask about. For hours Renee sits and listens. She learns more about our mother on that day than she has ever known before.
And finally Noni will talk about the Pause. “Once,” she says, “I went to church. I looked to that dry, ridiculous Father Johns for some kind of wisdom. But after Ellis died, my idea of religion changed. I became a nonbeliever. Your grandmother was turning over in her grave, I’m sure, but the world struck me as stark and unforgiving. There was no plan. No one—no entity, no power, no God—controlled a thing. Life was a struggle. Not without its joys, of course”—here Noni smiles—“but a struggle nonetheless to feed, clothe, house, love the people for whom I was responsible. My children. You four. I was the only one who would ever love you wholly. I was the only one who would give my life for yours, and this seemed an important and terrible burden.” Noni pauses and closes her eyes, opens them again. “It froze me. It did. The Pause, you kids called it. I couldn’t face it alone, any of it, but somehow you managed. The four of you, together. You got through and you forgave me. Thank you, Renee. I’ve never quite forgiven myself, but thank you.”
It is not that night that Noni dies, or the next, but two weeks later, after she’s admitted to the hospital and rendered mute by tubes and falls unconscious, long after Jonah’s graduation ceremony and our planned returns to the East Coast. We stay. Noni dies with us surrounding her in a strange bed, a strange city.
And I write. The success of The Love Poem grants me a certain degree of independence and I consider leaving ClimateSenseNow!, but I don’t. I stay and do what I can for another twenty-seven years. Through it all, the floods and the forced migrations. The west coast tsunami and Asian food shortages and all the talk talk talk from the politicians. I write and I work. Poetry guides me, guides so many through these times in a way that would have seemed impossible when I was a younger woman. Back then, poets seemed quaint, possibly irrelevant, but there is something about crisis that returns us to the fundamentals to make sense of an uncertain future and remind us of what we need to know. It’s been that way since humans began telling stories. We sang our poems, we chanted them. Only later did we write them down: Gilgamesh and the Iliad and Ramayana. Akhmatova and Tupac Shakur. In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time. Films and novels remain rooted in their age, give or or take a century. But poetry? Tell me The Canterbury Tales doesn’t still make you laugh and Keats make you cry. And, my dear girl Luna, why did your mother name you what she did?
You asked about the real Luna. You asked about my inspiration. All of my work, from The Love Poem to The Lasts, The Pond, Mothers and Fathers, even The Last Romantic, derived from my brother and my sisters. My first and greatest loves.
For many years love seemed to me not something that enriched or emboldened but a blind hole into which you fell, and in the falling you forgot what it was to live in your own light. This was the lesson I took from Noni and Caroline and all those restless young women who wrote to the Last Romantic. My last conversation with Joe, this was what made me so angry. Find someone to love, he told me. It seemed halfway between a cruel joke and condescension, a declaration of my weakness. I didn’t know then what the word meant, despite all those men, the flirtations, sex and analysis. But I learned. Perhaps it was Will, or Henry, or Noni, or my sisters or their children who taught me. Perhaps it was Joe and Luna.
I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.
And yet. And yet! We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?
Acknowledgments
This book was a long time coming. First and foremost my eternal gratitude, admiration, and respect to my agent, Michelle Brower, and editor, Kate Nintzel. These two read more drafts than I care to count, and saw me through personal and professional turmoil, doubt, and some seriously bad writing days. Thank you a million times over. Many people read and offered valuable comments on drafts over the years I spent writing this book (and my apologies if I’ve forgotten anyone!), particularly: Shannon Huffman Polson, Patricia Smith, Peggy Sarjeant, Katherine Malmo, Marilyn Dahl, Ruth Whippman, Kenna Hart, Elissa Steglich, Art Chung, Beth McFadden, Cynthia Fierstein, and Mari Hinojosa. The idea for this book first emerged from a family tragedy and it was with great trepidation that I sat down to explore it. I would not have been able to write a word without the blessing of my grandmother, Luella Briody Conklin, who passed away in 2014. Thank you, Nana, for teaching me how to say good-bye on the telephone and that real love is always messy. Thank you also to my extended family, all the Conklins, Mills, Stones, and MacLeans who—either tacitly or expressly—supported the writing of this book. I hope that the result does justice to the events and people that inspired it. To my sisters from another mister and partners in crime: Allison Augstyn, Carrie Barnes, Jen Beatty, Margot Kahn Case, Cheryl Contee, Naomi Donnelley, Elisabeth Eaves, Cynthia Fierstein, Heather Jarvis, Jody Lindwall, Susannah Lipsyte, Amy Mushlin, Amy Predmore, Paige Smith, Elissa Steglich, Ruth Whippman—your friendship and support in writing, life, and parenting are invaluable to me. To Arlen Rushwald, thank you for your generous insights into life in rural Nicaragua. To Chris Cain, thank you for the boat and the whisky. To Elisabeth Eaves and Joe Ray, thank you for the desk and the coffee. To Allison Mahaffy and all the folks at Sol Yoga, thank you for the peace and downward dogs. To the doctors in my life, Cynthia Fierstein, Naomi Donnelley, and Laura Conklin, thank you for answering my random medical questions (and it should go without saying that any errors in medical lingo, protocol, or education are mine alone). For professional insight into sibling loss, I relied principally on two excellent books: Surviving the Death of a Sibling: Living Through Grief When an Adult Brother or Sister Dies by Dr. T. J. Wray and The Empty Room: Understanding Sibling Loss by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. Gratitude to Emily Warn and Peter Mountford at Richard Hugo House where parts of this book were workshopped. To Liate Stehlik, Iris Tupholme, Kate Cassady, Tavia Kowalchuk, Kelly Rudolph, Lauren Truskowski, Vedika Khanna, and the whole William Morrow and HarperCollins Canada teams—my thanks for all that you do to help us scribblers get our work out into the world. Finally to my family, the people who inspire and challenge me, push my buttons, and piss me off, and without whom I would be lost: my children, Freya, Luke, and Rhys Conklin Maddock; my parents, Jay and Christina Conklin; and my sisters, Laura and Riisa Conklin.
About the Author
TARA CONKLIN is the author of the New York Times bestseller The House Girl. Trained as a lawyer, she worked for
an international human rights organization and at law firms in London and New York. She now lives in Seattle, Washington, with her family.
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Also by Tara Conklin
The House Girl
Copyright
Excerpt from MOMENTS OF BEING by Virginia Woolf. Copyright © 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Reprinted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.
Excerpt of three lines from “THE APPLICANT” FROM ARIEL by SYLVIA PLATH. Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Maps
Words and Music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase
Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd.
All Right Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the last romantics. Copyright © 2019 by Tara Conklin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover illustration by Joel Holland
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-235822-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-235820-2
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